Background
Lev Kamenev (originally Rosenfeld) was born in Moscow to a Jewish father and a Russian mother.
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Lev Kamenev (originally Rosenfeld) was born in Moscow to a Jewish father and a Russian mother.
He studied law at the University of Moscow, where he joined the Social Democratic party.
Following his arrest for antigovernment agitation, he fled to Paris in 1902 and became a confidante of Lenin. Nonetheless, he soon returned to Russia and joined the Bolshevik faction.
Rosenfeld moved to the Georgian city of Tiflis, where he headed the revolutionary movement. In Tiflis he assumed the Russian name Kamenev, meaning “Man of Stone.” Although he was a man of little personal ambition, he was well connected to other leading revolutionaries; his wife, Olga Bronstein, was Lev D. Trotsky’s sister. In Tiflis, he befriended Stalin and possibly introduced him to Lenin.
In 1908 Kamenev moved to Switzerland. There, as coeditor with Lenin of Proletarii and Socialdemokrat, two important party papers, he was first noted for his lucid and expressive writing. Although Lenin sent him back to Saint Petersburg in 1914 to oversee the progress of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma (Russian parliament), his reputation as a writer preceded him and Trotsky called on him to edit his own party newspaper, Pravda.
The years 1920 to 1925 mark the pinnacle of Kamenev’s power. After mending his breach with Lenin, he was appointed chairman of the Moscow Soviet, deputy chairman of the Council of Peoples’ Commissariats, and editor of Pravda. Following Lenin’s death, Kamenev, together with Stalin and Zinoviev, formed a triumvirate that governed Russia. The main rival to the triumvirate’s power was Trotsky, whom they opposed wholeheartedly. Only after discovering Stalin’s true intentions of becoming dictator of the Soviet Union did Kamenev and Zinoviev join Trotsky in opposing Stalin. Stalin attempted to rid himself of Kamenev, first by sending him as ambassador to Fascist Italy in 1926, and then, in 1927, by having him expelled from the party and exiled to the Urals.
Although Kamenev recanted his Trotskyite views, Stalin continued to view him as a threat. He was again expelled from the party in 1932 and again he recanted. Stalin used the 1934 assassination of Politburo member Sergey M. Kirov as grounds for the great purges of 1936. Kamenev was sentenced to death in a show trial in which he “admitted” participating in a Trotskyite plot to assassinate all members of the ruling Politburo. Some have suggested that Stalin’s motives in ridding himself of Kamenev were primarily anti-Semitic. Stalin himself denied this, saying, “We are fighting Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, not because they are Jews but because they are Oppositionists.”
Religion is a tool used by the ruling classes for the masses to relieve their suffering via the act of experiencing religious emotions.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Kamenev opposed Lenin’s policy supporting Russia’s defeat as a means of hastening the revolution. Despite this nationalist stance, for which he was later suspected of being an agent of the Okhrana (the Russian secret police), he was exiled to Siberia for the course of the war, only returning to Pctrograd during the general amnest granted by the provisional government following the February revolution. In the capital, he renewed his ties with Stalin, with whom he directed the revolt.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the leading and guiding force of Soviet society, and the nucleus of its political system, of all state and public organizations.
Communist Party member from 1901.
